


Mama Wati

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:25:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A water goddess shape-shifter who goes to bars as either a man or a woman depending on how the mood takes her.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Mama Wati

**Author's Note:**

> A water goddess shape-shifter who goes to bars as either a man or a woman depending on how the mood takes her.

Port-au-Prince at dusk. Chatter and noise. The promise of gun-fire. More than two million people living and breathing here and she knows them all, every one. Cité Soleil throbs like a beating heart. Mami Wata knows this place like the back of her hand. She comes visiting with the pouring rain.

 

Some nights she wears silk and sometimes she wears pearls, sometimes snake-skin and other times a sharp, sharp suit. She prowls through the bars and she drinks them all under the tables. Rum helps with forgetting, and she’s known that for a long time, since she came here with the first slaves in the ships. She built her home here out of beating hearts and slave songs and love. Boundless love. Mami Wata they call her, when they say their prayers. A _Mama Wati_ is a beautiful girl. She twists her hair around her fingers. Before coming out she took a bath, washed every inch of her with lemon-grass, bound her hair with spice. She wrapped a silver snake around her neck and let its head hang down between her breasts. In Africa, Mama Africa, a snake means that she is a Goddess, and she wears it proudly, to remind her that she is a mother to all of them, always.

 

Mami Wata doesn’t forget.

 

In the bar, she turns sideways to shimmy between them and her skirt rides up on her thigh, white silk against smooth brown skin. In the slave days, the good-bad days, they used to prize fairer skin, the fairer the better. The white men fathered bastard sons on golden skinned girls, sold the babies for dollars and got the next girl drunk on kill-devil and water. No babies for Mami Wata. Her body is hostile to human life. Maybe she’d turned snake if she bred; lay her eggs and forget all about them. It’s everybody else’s blood that she wants; she’s got no interest in her own. She’s a cold blooded creature. She has the ocean in her and it keeps her cool. A man reaches out for her, broad hand on the swell of her hip. She turns towards him, takes hold of his chin with her hand and makes him look down at her. She’s not so tall. He looks her in the face, handsome boy with golden eyes and a thin moustache, carefully waxed. She shows him what she shows them all. She shows them what _could_ be. What _ought_ to be. She shows him two bodies together in a bed, sheets washed so often that they’ve gone thin. No tourists come to the slums. She shows him how they’d look fucking in that bed, his skin darker than hers, the smooth slide of his hips and the press of her tits against his chest. The black of her hair across the white pillow. The red of the scratches that her nails leave across his back.

 

She shows him these things and then she asks him _if he prepared to love her and no other, for the rest of his life?_

No. She didn’t think so.

 

If only they’d be faithful to her all their lives, she’d give them beauty and riches beyond their wildest dreams, but handsome men are like sand, drifting from heart to heart, and it’s easy because every beautiful woman has something of the sea in her. It’s the women who leave things at the shrines for her, sweeties and scent, chocolates and chains. She likes spike heeled shoes. She prefers flowers for her hair. Her heels tap out staccato on the wooden floor when she tugs another one in with an arm around his neck and whispers _Love me your whole life_.

 

There’s a girl in a red dress and Mami Wata curls her arms around her neck, just so, and they dance together, swaying, breasts brushing breasts, hips twisting in syncopated circles. She likes the women best. Women are softer, sweeter but fiercer, too. Women have a wet earth place inside of them that blooms fruit and flower when needs be. That’s why she likes the women best, because women understand what it is to change, and what it costs. She leans in and kisses the girl and promises, with the press of lips and tongue, long life and deep beauty.

 

She goes home lonely, which she always does. They know too much these days to give her their whole hearts. They move too quickly, and leave her too soon, so Mami Wata is always lonely. They never want to change enough to please her. Metamorphosis is a word for how much it hurts to change.

 

In her youth, she could hold out her hands and find water with their trembling. Sometimes, there isn’t a lot of difference between divination and the act of being divine.

 


End file.
